How to Gain Self-Confidence [Why I Started Blogging]

Where I started – the journey on how to gain self-confidence

Late 2019 into early 2020, I found myself in a place of really low self-confidence. I wouldn’t say it happened suddenly but more of a result of numerous experiences and things piling one on top of another. In the summer of last year, I started working with a therapist to try to fix the headspace I was in. From this, it quickly became apparent that, amongst other things, I’d been living inauthentically for so long that I’d essentially forgotten who I was. 

Gone was the person who’d stand up in front of a crowd just to have my say on something I was passionate about. Gone was the woman who’d provide commentary without fear on some of the most controversial topics facing our modern world. Gone was the person who wouldn’t worry about what other people thought of her. I was a shell of myself, going day to day trying to keep everyone happy at the expense of my wellbeing. 

It was then that I decided it was time for me to go back to writing, which had been a great comfort to me when I was struggling with depression as a teenager. It had also been a safe place for me back then – somewhere where I could both escape to another world and face the reality of this one in a controlled way. 

Blogging became something I was interested in because I’d already successfully run and maintained my business website on another platform for a few years. The contract for that other platform was expiring and I needed another place to move which was at a lower cost. I was hesitant to put the pressure on myself to build a functioning e-commerce store as my first ever web development project (I had no experience before this as I’d been using a website building tool until then). Starting a personal blog seemed like a great practice run and allowed me to have my own corner of the internet to design to be exactly how I wanted. Once I set everything up, all that was left to do was write. 

Speaking my mind

Creating content was my first step in healing my self-confidence issues. I had become so scared to say anything that could potentially come back on me in a negative way, even though in the grand scheme of things, I was (and still am) a nobody so it’s not as if I have the papers following every word I say. Writing provided me with a safe outlet to discuss things I felt were important and gave me the feeling of being able to help others who might have similar opinions or questions on what I was talking about. I also fell in love with the concept of talking about all of the topics other people seemed too afraid to speak up on, such as female wellbeing and intimate health.

Rediscovering authenticity 

As I said, I’d lost most of who I was due to the series of events that led to the diminishing of my self-confidence. Through writing, I started to explore subjects I was passionate about and having my blog gave me the training wheels to feel ok with beginning to speak out. To be clear, I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready to jump headfirst into an aggressive debate again but I’m feeling so much better about actually giving my views nowadays. 

Realising that I don’t need to care

Not caring sounds like a bad way of putting it, but it’s the only way I can explain it. My history of people-pleasing was not only exhausting but a key example of self-sabotage. I’d care so much about keeping myself in everyone’s good books that I’d bottle up everything I thought about anything, replacing sentences with simple words of agreement, even if I never actually wanted to agree in the first place. Blogging allowed me the space to press ‘publish’ and feel the rush of, essentially, not caring if someone doesn’t agree with me. We’re all different and all entitled to our viewpoints. 

Even if people hate it, I can’t change that

A final, major lesson I learned through coming back to writing was that I can’t change other people’s responses to the things I do. Not everyone is going to love every single thing I say or piece of writing I create and that’s just a fact of life. My therapist posed to me a question: ‘so what?’ in response to me saying I was worried people would hate what I had to say. In the beginning, I’d tie myself in knots trying to answer her but as time went on, I thought yeah, so what?